Smoking Poppy by Graham Joyce (the read aloud family .txt) 📕

fragrant hippy who had washed up on our quiz team. Decker, Lucy said his name was. I don’t know why but I wondered if this Decker was ever likely to have been Charlie’s supplier. We lived in a small city after all: perhaps he was the one who’d got her on to the stuff in the first place.

I had another couple of beers before going to bed, though I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about travel arrangements and about getting out of my work commitments. I also lay there thinking up one or two raw questions I’d got for this Decker.

7

Blame, you see. A sharpened knife has to blunt itself somewhere. I badly needed to blame.

I’d already constructed several scenes inside my head. Decker the fragrant hippy, in the coffee bars and the pubs frequented by the young. Decker, laughing, witty, cool, effortlessly slagging off the establishment and work-a-day daddies like me, rolling up his doped cigarettes, casually passing them on in the middle of a conversation, as if it was nothing. Decker, speaking with authority about the meaningful lyrics of some rock and roll wankers from Manchester, counting out pills to his rapt audience. Christ, I even saw him waiting outside the school gates, dispensing little plastic sachets he called sherbet fountains. And always in the coffee bar, or in the audience, or at the front of the queue by the school gates, was Charlie with rapt, shining eyes. Charlie, smoking his stuff, popping his pills, drinking in his warmed-over hippie philosophies.

I knew these images were all bollocks, but I couldn’t stop them playing out on the back of my retina. I’d be chasing the plaster wall on a rewiring job or installing a new junction box and I’d realise my hands were gripping the tools so tight they’d be trembling.

I was finishing off a sub-contract job I’d been getting behind on, new house, crawling under the eaves in a sloping attic, trying to haul cable through to where I was working. My face was tracked with perspiration, and there was sawdust sticking to the sweat.

I crawled out of the hole, wiping the sweat and sawdust on my sleeve. Flipping open a box of snouts I pulled one out with my teeth. I thought about Decker, and how I would knock his teeth so far down his throat he would need a surgeon with a torch to find them again. Then I would ask him what he knew about Charlie.

I thumped the stud wall and it set up a wobble which travelled all the way round the corner. Shoddy work. Bad builders. They don’t think about us poor fuckers coming behind them, having to put in the fucking wires. I crawled back under the eaves.

I spent a lot of time that week thinking about Charlie. Even though she wasn’t dead, I was like someone leafing through a box of old photographs after a funeral. When she was very small I used to go into her room while she slept in her cot. I could stand there for a long time just watching her sleep, the miracle of her, the sweet, holy marvel of her. Somehow when she slept her normally fine, straight hair would billow in curls as if she was flying in a place of soft, warm winds; her effortless aerial control demonstrated by her posture, one arm pointing at the top corner of the cot, the other drifting low and behind her. I had no doubt that this child was in flight, soaring through dreams bright with music, vivid with the colours and inebriated freshness exclusive to a mind only two years old.

I could stand there for half an hour watching her trajectory, wondering where it was she might land.

I suppose I wanted to be with her on those flights, inside her dreams.

I wondered now whether I had spent my time watching her too closely. Maybe it’s not healthy. Children whose fathers don’t give a sod about them seem to emerge without too much damage. I knew I was setting myself up as a candidate for all this blame I was ready to discharge. I was putting myself in the frame, lined up in the police identity parade with the Deckers of the world. I wanted to know how that little flying girl came to be grounded on a filthy pallet bed in some place called Chiang Mai.

‘How did you get on with them?’ Lucy at the library wanted to know.

It was a rainy Friday evening, and I was returning the Keats and the Coleridge and the other book. Basically they were a dead loss. There was the odd phrase which stuck in the mind, but I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. I couldn’t imagine spending three years at university reading this tosh. Maybe it made more sense around the time these old boilers were actually writing, and Oxford professor types keep them going because they are too lazy to read anything new.

‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘I’m going to try something else.’

‘Are you growing a beard?’ Lucy’s electronic pen chirruped with satisfaction as it scanned my returns for the library computer. I felt my chin. Apathy had raised a crop of stubble, and my hair was creeping below my collar. ‘Suits you,’ she said. ‘Makes you look less buttoned-up.’

I stalked among the shelves looking for something else to take home, wondering what she meant by ‘buttoned-up’. I was also trying to remember the names of some of those other deadbeat poets Izzy had mentioned. In the meantime I picked up another book, this time about the history of the opium trade. Then I remembered the name of Baudelaire, so I asked Lucy to help me.

She was already in the act of switching off the lights, closing up for the evening. I was the last borrower. ‘You are going at it, aren’t you?’ she said, in the way you might remark to someone who’s drunk half a bottle of vodka before breakfast. Anyway she